That’s Life

“Prometheus” and “Dark Horse.”

Noomi Rapace in Ridley Scott’s first science-fiction film since “Blade Runner.”Credit Illustration by Martin Ansin

I have fervently loved only one film from Ridley Scott’s irrepressible output—“Thelma & Louise” (1991), with its beautiful women on the lam, its casual mayhem, sex, and giddy exhilaration. But Scott has made good movies in many genres. He has had a long career as a superlative craftsman of violent spectacle, including the stomach-piercing and (for the audience) stomach-churning science-fiction horror story “Alien” (1979); the rain-soaked, velvety, darkly mysterious “Blade Runner” (1982); the whirling, clangorous “Gladiator” (2000); the war film “Black Hawk Down” (2001), with its continuous lines of spatially connected action; and “American Gangster” (2007), a knowing portrait of Harlem crime bosses forging their way through the murderous ups and downs of the drug trade. Among commercially successful, big-time directors, perhaps only Steven Spielberg has produced a greater number of memorable images and sequences. Scott’s new movie, “Prometheus,” in 3-D, is his first sci-fi project since “Blade Runner,” and it certainly has a look—it’s grand, sombre, and gray, like some region of Hell that Dante never got around to mapping. Scott chooses his palette and sticks to it; he’s not a director who throws color or digital uproar or meaningless airborne collisions across the screen. He’s not out to charm or tease. The action is weighted and scary, the opposite of glib. He wants to impress us; he wants to scare the hell out of us.

“Prometheus” begins aeons ago, in a frigid, magnificently drab region of the earth, next to a waterfall, where a circular spaceship silently looms and deposits a humanoid creature: a phosphorescent, bald, naked fellow. He cracks apart and disintegrates, and his DNA-laden chromosomes sink into the water. The screenplay, by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof, has an epic scope: from these fragments the human race will eventually be born. The movie then jumps ahead to 2089, when two archeologists, Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and her boyfriend, Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), discover some cave paintings with figures pointing to a planet or a moon. It’s an invitation to visit, Shaw reasons. A few years later, the couple are part of the crew of a trillion-dollar spaceship, Prometheus, embarking on a two-year journey to the planet on which, they believe, the gods who created us live. Shaw uneasily wears a cross around her neck; she can’t give up the God of the Bible, even if he may not exist.

The Prometheus expedition, despite its grandiose ambitions, is a corporate endeavor, headed by Meredith Vickers, who is played by a distant, short-tempered Charlize Theron, looking sleeker than ever in a silver-gray mohair suit—the epitome of outer-space chic. Vickers and the rest of the crew have been suspended in pods for the journey, and tended by David (Michael Fassbender), an elegant blond android who amuses himself during the voyage by bicycling around the ship and shooting baskets. “Lawrence of Arabia” is his favorite movie; in his spare time, he preens, dyeing and brushing his hair until it’s golden and shiny, like Peter O’Toole’s. As the ship is about to land, David wakes everybody up; he’s polite, even obsequious, but he’s subtly ironic, too, and increasingly malevolent. He’s a more than worthy successor to Kubrick’s HAL, from “2001,” who, after all, was just a large red eye staring out of a computer and speaking in a soothingly dominant voice. David brings out the wit in Fassbender’s formidable self-possession in a way that none of his human characters have.

Moviegoers may remember that “Alien” is also about a corporate project. The spaceship Nostromo is hauling a dreary cargo of ore back to Earth when it inadvertently allows an unpleasant intruder on board, and ordinary life becomes a nightmare. “Prometheus” shares some preoccupations and visual motifs with the old shocker. There is a huge, horseshoe-shaped spaceship; hissing, viscous creatures; and an obsession with the violation of the human body—Scott’s specialty in outlandish horror. Yet, despite what you may have heard, “Prometheus” is not literally a prequel. “Alien” turns into a haunted-spaceship movie; the large, damp, black creature pursues its victims through enclosed corridors, eliminating one after another. “Prometheus” is just as scary but less claustrophobic. The spaceship lands in a barren gray area. Before it, across a vast terrain, lies an enormous circular, closed-off structure. We thought that only man could make something as forbidding as a slag heap, but apparently gods are capable of ugliness, too.

The crew members issue forth, and the fear begins. They root around in mucky tunnels and caverns, greeted only by white speckled apparitions that look like holographic versions of the phosphorescent guy we saw earlier. There is a snaky creature underfoot, a body in a coffin, and a vast arsenal of weapons, but the creators have left the planet. Have they lost interest in us? The puzzle grows ominous. Are they going to destroy us? “Prometheus,” I suppose, could be dismissed as a metaphysical “Boo!” movie. There are the usual attacks by creatures with tentacles that loop in and out of someone’s mouth, and worse: when Shaw is impregnated with the wrong kind of baby, Scott puts her through a Cesarean so strange and abrupt that it’s a comic horror. Our response is saved from disgust by the extreme heroism of her suffering and endurance. Noomi Rapace is small and slender, but, as she demonstrated in the Swedish version of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” she’s as fast as a whippet and precise in her fury. Scott may always have had an eye on the box office, but from “Alien” and “Thelma & Louise” on, he has made women into heroines. In that regard, he’s still ahead of the curve. Rapace’s scene is a classic of its kind; it tops John Hurt’s notorious misfortunes in “Alien.”

There is too much trolling around in the dark, and some garbled and repetitive plot turns in the film, but, when the action breaks out across that slate-colored plain, Scott uses 3-D well, giving the movement persuasive depth. He knows that the sight of a real human body charging through actual space is what produces excitement, a simple enough lesson (all the old Hollywood directors knew it) that has recently collapsed into airborne digital scrambles in “Avengers” and a dozen movies like it. “Prometheus” may be a brutal spectacle and a scare show, but Ridley Scott’s craft is all-powerful. This movie earns an exhausted respect.

“Dark Horse,” the new film by Todd Solondz, the New Jersey poet of bleakness and despair (“Welcome to the Dollhouse,” “Happiness”), poses the question: Is it possible to make an engaging movie about an infantile jerk? The odds are certainly against it. Abe (Jordan Gelber) is a portly college dropout who lives, at the age of thirty-five, with his parents (Christopher Walken and Mia Farrow) and works for his father, unhappily, in a commercial real-estate company. Abe is a liar and a fantasist, a sorehead who throws tantrums. As always, Solondz portrays suburban New Jersey as a kind of prison in which never an original or a lively word is spoken. Abe, trapped and unable to find a way out, desperately throws himself at an attractive but morose woman, Miranda (Selma Blair), who also still lives at home. Blair is serious and muted—she looks like Susan Sontag without the restless energy.

Much of the time, Solondz works deep within banality, which he finds both sad and funny. He’s a minor master of black comedy: the flattened emotional response; the awkward, leaden non sequitur; the perverse desire lurking beneath a bland surface. In some ways, he seems almost trapped himself, as if he can’t shake his New Jersey childhood. In the past, he has come close to punishing us with his sufferings, but “Dark Horse” shows a greater expressive warmth and flexibility. If the underside of banality is black comedy, the underside of dark comedy may be an almost limitless reserve of pity. Solondz can be cruel to his characters, but this time he isn’t. Though Abe is an unhappy loser, Solondz stays with him. He leaves behind his initial strategy of stunted realism and, by degrees, and with great skill (the film is beautifully lit by the cinematographer Andrij Parekh), moves into Abe’s fantasies, which become progressively more strange and humiliating. The answer, then, to the question asked by the movie is “Yes, if you’re an artist.” As in some of David Lynch’s work, we can’t always tell whether we’re in the real world or inside the character’s head—Jordan Gelber’s temperament and affect are the same in both. (Some of his snarling intonations and moods of lovelorn chagrin may remind you of Paul Giamatti in his early days.) Abe is blustery and self-pitying, but, with Solondz’s new tender mercies fully engaged, Gelber makes you feel close to a guy for whom nothing was ever meant to go right. ♦

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